Regular practice

One of the things I'll be writing about here is my regular magickal practice – the stuff I try to do daily to try and progress my magickal life. So to begin with I thought I'd just lay out what it is I do at the moment.

Currently I take an hour a day to perform a regular practice. It currently consists of:

About twenty minutes of meditation aimed at just calming me down and getting ready for an act of magick

Performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram – this is a pretty standard banishing ritual, and takes about five minutes. I'll write about banishing and why I do it in a later post, but if you're interested in exactly what this ritual involves you can find a description of the steps here. (not a terribly detailed description, mind you, but I'll write about it myself with time)

Performing the Bornless Rite – the purpose of this ritual is to invoke ones 'higher power' or 'to achieve the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel'. There's a lot to write about this, but I'll get to it in time. This takes around about half an hour.

If things have gone well another ten minutes or so of contemplation meditation to have a think about what I've just done

This has been my daily practice for about three months now, and somewhat to my surprise I've been able to perform it every day in that period. There's a lot to be gained from a daily practice, beyond the basic fact that doing something regularly means you get a lot better at it. But for now – this is what I do, and I'll try to explain it a little better with time.

Actually, my plan is that after I've done a few more posting on meditation I was going to move on and write a bit about banishing – why I do it, how I do it, and so on. I'd also recommend this short article – http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/rit_banishintro.html – by Phil Hine as a good introduction.

I'm familiar with the Regardie book. He's an interesting guy – one of the first to really embrace the idea of publishing and explaining the 'secret' practices that had only been a part of magickal orders up until that time (and which have now been published many times and are all over the internet). He also bridges the gap of the rather obscure, 'difficult' writing of authors that came before and the more down-to-earth, easy to grasp, writers that followed. As a result I don't tend to find him *all* that readable and prefer some of the more modern writers – but he certainly knew his stuff.